Biden EPA issued waiver in final days without a press release
Just days before leaving office, the Biden administration quietly waived congressionally mandated “Build America, Buy America” rules for its $7 billion flagship solar program, allowing grant recipients to use federal funds to purchase solar panels assembled with foreign-made components.
The Environmental Protection Agency finalized the one-year waiver for the Solar for All program on Jan. 10, 2025—without issuing an accompanying press release. At the time, the Biden EPA acknowledged that most solar panel components are sourced from China and that the agency’s goals—including “climate action and energy justice”—would be derailed without the waiver.
The waiver, which remains in effect and has largely gone undetected, ultimately enables Chinese manufacturers to reap the benefits of billions of dollars in American taxpayer funding under the Solar for All program.
The EPA initially portrayed the program as part of former president Joe Biden’s “Investing in America agenda” after it selected 60 local governments and nonprofits as recipients of the funding in April 2024. The Biden White House cited Solar for All as one of its top initiatives to “strengthen American solar manufacturing and protect manufacturers and workers from China’s unfair trade practices.”
Biden’s secretive waiver underscores the tension between Democrats’ green energy objectives and broader goals to boost domestic manufacturing—in addition to solar panels and solar components, electric vehicle batteries, wind turbines, and long-duration utility batteries are largely sourced from manufacturers overseas. It also reveals substantial cracks in the Biden-era Investing in America agenda, which promised to reshore production of a wide range of green energy technologies.
“The Biden administration claimed to be ‘investing in America,’ then granted a last-minute waiver to bypass Buy America rules, effectively funneling taxpayer dollars into solar panels made with Chinese components,” Jason Isaac, the CEO of the American Energy Institute, told the Washington Free Beacon. “It was economic surrender disguised as climate policy.”
“Thankfully, Administrator Zeldin is rolling back this kind of regulatory insanity—including ending the flawed endangerment finding—and restoring the EPA to its core mission of protecting American prosperity, not sabotaging it,” he continued.
Democrats’ 2022 Inflation Reduction Act created the Solar for All program, which was designed to funnel $7 billion to local jurisdictions that would then fund residential rooftop solar and other solar development projects. The EPA said the program, one of the largest solar development initiatives in the world, would help reduce or avoid greenhouse gas emissions by more than 30 million metric tons.
But the bipartisan Build America, Buy America Act, which was incorporated in Biden’s trillion-dollar infrastructure law passed in late 2021, mandates that all of the iron, steel, manufactured products, and construction materials used in infrastructure projects must be produced in the United States.
Those Build America requirements present a potentially existential crisis for the Solar for All program. Overall, 97 percent of solar wafers and 85 percent of solar cells, two key components of solar panels, are made in China, according to the International Energy Agency. Less than 1 percent of global supplies of both solar wafers and solar cells are manufactured in the United States.
In addition, the vast majority of the global supply of steel frames used to encase solar panels are manufactured by Chinese producers, the EPA noted in its Solar for All waiver document.
The EPA waiver still requires solar panels purchased under the program to be assembled in the United States. In recent years, some of the largest Chinese solar panel makers have constructed assembly plants in the United States while keeping their production of solar panel components in China.
The Solar Energy Manufacturers for America Coalition, an industry group that represents American solar manufacturers, warned the EPA and other federal agencies considering similar actions in December that a waiver on Buy America rules would harm American companies. The coalition argued there are enough domestic supplies to meet Buy America requirements over the next three years.
“This proposed waiver action is a short-term solution that significantly undermines efforts underway to reshore the entire solar supply chain,” the group wrote. “The proposed waiver would allow Chinese-owned companies assembling solar panels in the U.S. and selling them at below market value to benefit from American taxpayer dollars and undermine American manufacturers and workers. With the SEMA Coalition’s proposed restrictions, the administration can avoid handing over taxpayer dollars to Chinese-owned companies.”
In a statement to the Free Beacon, EPA spokeswoman Molly Vaseliou confirmed the agency is aware of the waiver, but did not say whether it would revoke it.
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